The survey from freelancer and self-employed group, IPSE, and online workplace, Elance-oDesk, found a net positive outlook on business prospects, perhaps because of an increase in the volume of work and day rates.
It also found an increasing confidence in the UK economy, reversing the trend over the last three quarters.
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“This optimism is accompanied by an increase in both net earnings and day rates. Over the last twelve months day rates have risen 5.6 per cent, which along with an increase in the number of days worked, has contributed greatly to freelancer earnings outperforming that of employees and the increasing business confidence seen in the report.”
Hayley Conick, from Elance-oDesk in the UK said: “Business confidence is clearly on the up. Over 60 per cent of freelancers who have worked for their clients via Elance-oDesk expect their revenues to increase in the next 12 months. With a third of freelancers experiencing a growth in work volume over the last three months, the general outlook is very positive indeed.”
Key findings
Key findings from the freelancer confidence index are:
- Freelancers continue to outperform the earnings of typical employees by a considerable margin. Freelancers’ average quarterly earnings have reached £30,000 which is roughly 20 per cent more than employees earn in a year.
- Day rates have experienced one per cent growth since the last quarter, rising from £525 in Q4 of 2014 to £531 in Q1 of 2015. The majority of freelancers (56 per cent) expect day rates to stay at current levels, while 27 per cent expect them to increase and 17 per cent anticipate a fall.
- Capacity utilisation of freelancers has reached record levels, with 87 per cent of freelancers under contract at the time of survey.
- More freelancers are reporting an increase in the volume of work undertaken over the last three months (38 per cent) than those reporting a fall (20 per cent). This is the highest percentage of freelancers recorded reporting a rise in activity.
- Business confidence* for the coming three months has risen from 3.95 to 9.42 while the twelve month outlook index rose from 0.6 to 7.19.
- The three month confidence index for the UK economy rose from 5.7 to 16.48 from the last quarter, its second highest level over the last year, while the twelve month outlook rose from 4.75 to 18.05.
(*Freelancers were asked to identify their confidence levels for future relative to current performance in one of five categories comprising: more confident, slightly more confident, as confident, slightly less confident, and a lot less confident. The confidence index is created by scoring each of five answers with 100, 50, 0, -50 and -100 respectively and then taking the weighted average score for the sample. Index scores can range from -100 to 100.)
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Susie Hughes © Shout99 2015
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